9 Quotes by Pete Dexter

[He] did not understand women. It wasn't the way bartenders or comedians didn't understand women, it was the way poor people didn't understand the economy. You could stand outside the Girard Bank Building every day of your life and never guess anything about what went on in there. That's why, in their hearts, they'd always rather stick up a 7-Eleven.

... It took him one minute to write. Bill stood over him, watching. "I don't know how you do that," he said. "Like the words are already inside the pen.""It's just what's in your brain," Charley said. "The way the words come to you naturally is the best way to put them down."Bill said, "The things in my head don't come in words.

...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

He looked at a story about a new gun they had out in California that spit seventy rounds in four seconds. They called it the "Peace Conservator." They were always doing some damn thing in California that nobody had thought out the consequences.

Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-storey trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job.

The boy shot Wild Bill's horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself

I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.

From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head’s all misshapen and pointy, and you say, “Son, you were born with talent.

He was a newspaperman,′ he said, ’but there’s some people who should never leave Savannah.